assassinsAn oldie but goodie flick - Antonio Banderas and Sylvester Stallone both play the role of assassins who engage in a deadly competition. This is one of the better roles given to Stallone and he has been given some pretty terrible ones. The plot deviates from reality in almost every sense, but delivers the sort of action scenes that we love.

Synopsis (from WikiPedia):

Robert Rath (Stallone) is a paid assassin who wants nothing more than to get out of ‘the business’, haunted by the death of murdering his own mentor years ago. Rath is quiet, morose professional who is on an assignment to kill someone when someone else gets to the ‘mark’ (the target) before he does. That person is Miguel Bain (Banderas), a fellow assassin and a competitive psychopath. Rath then has the trouble of trying to figure out who sent Bain, while at the same time being offered a job that could financially allow him to retire - killing the customers of a computer hacker named Electra (Moore) and retrieving her alive along with a disk that contains sensitive information. Electra has a voyeuristic fetish, she set up cameras in her neighbor’s apartment and watches their bedroom.

The problem is that Bain is assigned to kill Electra as well. Bain kills the customers and tries to kill Electra, but Rath comes to the rescue. His pay for the job is given to him in a briefcase — which turns out to actually contain a bomb — his backer tried to kill him. When this attempt fails — along with the fact that the disc he turned over was a fake — the backer hires Bain to terminate him. Now having become a ‘mark’ himself, he must try and extract enough money out of his backer so he can disappear for good, while avoiding the bloodthirsty Bain.

I give this one about 4¼ stars. I subtract most of a star due to the following: 1. assassins will not hesitate to off a woman as Stallone’s character did; 2. it seems like assassins with hot tempers who pursue their tasks with reckless abandon would not survive as long as Banderas’ character does; 3. Moore fades from a confident con artist to a helpless bumbling female toward the later stages of the flick - convenient for Stallone’s character, but dulls Moore’s.

Gunography (text borrowed from IMFDB):

  1. Beretta M92F - A security guy is using a Beretta M92F after the attack in the graveyard scene.
  2. Ruger .22 - Both Stallone and Banderas use silenced Ruger MK1 or MK2 .22 caliber pistols, fitted with suppressors. Even though it only has a 10 round magazine, they seem to have those infamous bottomless Hollywood magazines that never run out.
  3. Goncz GA-9 - In the cemetery scene Antonio Banderas uses a 9mm Goncz pistol fitted with a stock and scope to take out the mark at the funeral. This is the weapon he later uses in the cab.
  4. Walther PP - In the beginning of the movie, we see Stallone taking out another assassin. He allows him to use his own weapon to kill himself. It is a suppressed Walther PP in either .32 or .380.